John B. Lee is Poet Laureate of Norfolk County on the north shore of Lake Erie where I grew up on a tobacco farm smack in the middle of a geologic formation called the Norfolk Sand Plain. He lives in Port Dover, home of the peculiar fresh water fishing boat called the turtle back (photos provided upon request), also Fred Eaglesmith, the singer, and a bar called The Brig in the basement of which several American interlopers were held captive during the War of 1812 (not an unpleasant prison experience, one imagines, as these things go). John is an old friend and a prolific author of more than 60 books. These poems are part of a forthcoming collection entitled Let Us Be Silent Here (Sanbun Publishers, New Delhi, India, 2012). The poems were translated into Spanish by Manuel de Jesus Velázquez Léon for a recent reading John gave in Havana, Cuba, and we also have, here, the Spanish versions. But the poems themselves are based on a trip John made to the Holy Land and his reading of Palestinian and Israeli poets. This is a vast message loop–Canada, Israel, India and Cuba–something to get your minds around as you read these poems. But the poems themselves are gorgeous meditations on that thorny, dry land, birthplace of great world religions, refuge for the Holocaust remnant, where the geology is a book of prayer and story blossoms in the ruins.

this is the closest I will ever come
to seeing
through the eyes
of the Messiah
this mask of stars
this moon

John has contributed to Numéro Cinq twice before. See those earlier poems here and here.

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Book cover detail from The Rooftop, a painting by Israeli poet/artist Helen Bar-Lev

I have retted the linen
and carded the wool
of two voices
and my hands are rich
and smooth
with the lanolin
of my work
anointed by the silkening
oil of the seed of the field

and from these
I have fashioned
a garment of sky
for the mind and the soul
imaginary blue
haunted by the absent dazzle
of stars in the dark

and next to my skin
I fasten a shirt of earth
where the heart
falls in green
through green
like the crimson drop
of a peach hooked high
in the sun
let loose from the pull
of a ripening stem
and it plunges and subsides
plunges and subsides
like the soften gone still
of fruit on a bruise

I have entered into this place
of the lost
lost elders, lost children of Europe
with its death-grey
housefly-grey burnt-ash grey
crematorium
what the cruel past calls
historical
once horror beat in the breast
like a great-winged bird
where its flame-shadow
fell in the blood
and its season’s plunge
was a sea of fire

how is it that we set the lists
in volumes tall as life
and learn where quiet ladders lean
to say the darkness in the names
that burn the pages through
with ink gone into smoke—singsoftly, softly, let’s be silent here—

oh reverent grief
that war is done
those lives
have lined the earth with bones
like rootwork of a thousand-thousand-thousand
wind-broken trees

the soul of man
grimes over
like a lamp of oil
and shame shines through
the tainted light we touch

this is the closest I will ever come
to seeing
through the eyes
of the Messiah
this mask of stars
this moon
pale as a sickly child
and in the daylight
blue heaven blooms
with those invisible
constellations
subsumed by the sun

my son asks
“why did Christ make no mention
of dinosaurs?”
American critic Harold Bloom
says, “Christ was a mortal
god—and we humans
are immortal animals …”
one Toronto theologian suggests
“Christ’s life is the same
as the life of ancient
Egyptian god Horace
and the Beatitudes are
plagiarized
from mythologies
far older
than the gospels”and I
looking up at Cassiopeia, at
Orion’s belt
at the inconstant drift of the milky way
with my contemporary
contemplation
of this much-storied universe

consider Aristotle, Copernicus
Galileo, Newton, Einstein
Hawkins, the resonant
music of cosmic strings
living here in these entropics
on this event horizon
my life like a snowflake
falling onto the surface
of a great water
or an ember
briefly breath-crimson in the grey glow
of a larger ash

pull the bow on the arrow of time
from nock to tip
at this motionless moment
the quiver is full
as a clutch of ornamental reeds
and the one wound I make is doubt
and the other
pure belief, and I feel
in the presence of placeless place
and in the absence of timeless time
a common faith
in the sorrowful joy
of letting the arrow sing

I stand in the slipping heap
on the rocky berm
of a seven-thousand
year old excavation
and evidence is everywhere
that we vanish when we die
as in ashes
as in dust
on the sun-blackened stone
not one scrap
of bone, nor tool
to thrill the tell
the shovel turns
its voice on basalt
broken from a broken wall
imagine here
a house, and here a well
wherein the water’s ghost
descends
beyond the darkest dark
to dry the falling cup

and yet, see here
they lived—
these ancient people
of a former time

they loved and thrived
and bore their children
out of hope
they worked the fields
and flailed the grain and died
to keep their store
as heroes die and die again
in endless war

the sun
improves my shadow
with a sharp-edged light
what drums I hear
are of my living heart
please take my word
that I was here
and thought of you
as dry wells
think on rain

John B. Lee is the author of over sixty published books. His most recent book, Let Us Be Silent Here, is forthcoming from Sanbun Publishers in New Delhi, India. He is currently working on a memoir of his life in hockey. Under the working title, You Can Always Eat the Dogs: the hockeyness of ordinary men, it is forthcoming from Black Moss Press in the summer/fall of 2012. Inducted as Poet Laureate of the city of Brantford in perpetuity, he was also recently appointed Poet Laureate of Norfolk County where he now lives in Port Dover, a fishing town located on the south coast of Lake Erie. A recipient of over seventy prestigious international awards for his writing, the poems taken from Let Us Be Silent Here, were inspired by an eighteen day journey through Israel and Jordan. He and Manuel have collaborated on translations on several occasions, the most substantial project being Sweet Cuba, a bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry in original Spanish with English translations.

Manuel de Jesus Velázquez Léon is a professor at University of Hoguin. A co-founder of the Canada Cuba Literary Alliance, he is editor-in-chief of the bilingual literary journal, The Ambassador. He and John B. Lee collaborated on the 360-page bilingual anthology Sweet Cuba: The Building of a Poetic Tradition: 1608-1958, (Hidden Brook Press, 2010). Sweet Cuba has been called “the most significant book of translated Cuban poetry ever published.” He lives in Holguin, Cuba, with his wife and their young son and is the publisher of Sand Crab books which recently printed a bilingiual editon of Saskatchewan Poet Laureate Glen Sorestad’s book, A Thief of Impeccable Taste.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

… the poetry of Yehuda Amachai is a challenge to me, because we write about the same place. … so we have a competition: who is the owner of the language of this land? Who loves it more? Who writes it better? — Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian↵

“the linsey-woolsey of our being together…” is from a poem by Jehuda Amichai inspired by the concept of ‘shatnez’↵

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